In what may be the highest-proﬁle Crips murder case since the Snoop Dogg “Murder Was the Case” incident, a Los Angeles high-school football star on his way to a full ride at Oregon was implicated last week in an investigation that reads like a Sociology 101 lesson in Crips hierarchies.

Jurray Casey, a star linebacker for Long Beach’s Poly High football team, was identiﬁed in a pretrial hearing by police gang experts as a member of the Insane Crips gang. Casey, it seems, had originally been tagged as an Insane gangbanger following a February 2005 shoot-out between the Insane Crips and members of another gang, called the Rolling 20s. Police investigating that incident found a shoebox in Casey’s room that read “B.I.G. Ray Ray (forever),” which police speculated meant “Baby Insane Gang,” with Ray Ray being Casey’s “gang moniker.”

According to news reports, both the Rolling 20s and the Insane Crips are considered part of the Crips gang, although the two are rivals. In a sports-relevant side note to the trial, Jones, the testifying ofﬁcer at the hearing, was apparently threatened during testimony by a known Crips member. He was overheard saying to her, “You’ll catch my fade,” which is apparently a threat in Crips-ese. It’s also a football term, as New Englanders are probably not aware, since the midget wideouts on the Patriots have all but driven the fade from the home team’s playbook in recent years.

Casey and a co-defendant are charged with shooting a 17-year-old named Rashad Ali in a drive-by this January. The shooting took place following a local krumping competition in Culver City; both the victim and Casey’s co-defendant had participated in the contest. If you’re white and/or older than 25, you should know that krumping is a sort of African-inspired mutation of break dancing and a major LA street-culture phenomenon that’s about ten minutes away from having its own 2 Fast 2 Furious–esque Hollywood treatment.

Insane hoop moms
First it was Bron-Bron’s mom. Now the mother of another celebrated high-school-to-NBA star, the Phoenix Suns’ Amare Stoudamire, has been sent up on aggravated-DUI charges, and she may actually see some very serious time.

In a case that is signiﬁcantly less humorous than the Gloria James case, Carrie Mae Stoudamire was sentenced to three years in prison for driving drunk and crashing into a Jersey barrier last October 21. Carrie Mae was also charged with showing a fake license to the arresting ofﬁcer.

Amare’s mom has been in trouble with the law before. Among other things, she was convicted in a shoplifting case involving $1000 worth of Nieman Marcus goods, and she was also convicted in a 2003 DUI case that left her on probation and under house arrest. The judge in Carrie Mae’s case was sufﬁciently nervous about her unsupervised presence in society that she rejected her request to attend church services.

A living history Since Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is set in a specific place and time, some theatergoers will want to relegate its incidents and attitudes — which surround the Rodney King riots — to history.

Crips and Bloods: Made in America Stacy Peralta's new documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America suggests how frightening it is to be born black and eight miles off the Pacific coastline.

Death of a hoop dream This past fall, Mario Hornsby Jr., then a senior at Springfield Central High School, wrote an essay for English class.

Cheap thrills They say Dr. Lakra got his pen name from the doctor’s bag he carried around when he first began tattooing, two decades ago. “Lakra” puns on the Spanish word “lacra,” meaning scar or blemish, but it’s also slang for “delinquent” or “scumbag.”

Streets of sorrow Two years ago, in one of the most concentrated bursts of deadly violence Boston had seen in years, nine victims were killed in 20 days.

Cease and desist In its five years from conception to unraveling, the Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire became one of the most respected urban defensives in American history.

Review: The Book of Eli In a post-Apocalyptic landscape of ash and destruction infested by slack-jawed cannibal gangs with carious grins, a man walks resolutely toward the sea, bearing with him the light of humanity.

Raising the Bar (Rock) On the "Rock and Roll Means Well" tour, Drive-By Truckers and the Hold Steady upgraded their respective brands of quintessential American bar rock with a number of arena-rock trimmings.

The guns of Boston More people were murdered in Boston over the past two months than in any May-to-June stretch since 1990.

Call it a comeback Alabama offspring Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley have been making raucous rock and roll together in one band or another for the past 23 years, about the same time it takes most offspring to grow up and get real jobs.

LET GO, METS | August 18, 2010 As difficult as this summer has been for those of us counted among the Red Sox faithful, let's all agree: it would be a hell of a lot worse to be a New York Mets fan right now.